I enjoy my work (software development) very much. I feel very fortunate to be able to earn a living from doing something I enjoy. However, this does mean I do it a lot. Not just during the working day, but at lots of other times too. This causes many people to ask if I ever stop working or relax. Well, working to me can be and often is relaxing and doesn’t always feel like work. Lots of people tell me I need to stop working so much, they want me to conform to their idea of what not working is.

Then there’s Bloodstock. The heavy metal festival once a year (where I am now) where I spend three days in a field and I don’t want to take my laptop. It wouldn’t be very practical if I did. Although having switched from Vodafone to EE (one of the best decisions I ever made) I do now have 4G all the time.

I do take my kindle and I find that I read, a lot. Do I miss my laptop? No, not really and I know it’s there in the evening and morning in the hotel if I really feel the need (which I did just now when I wrote this). This time around I’m not opening an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and writing code at every opportunity because I feel like I’d rather have my head in book.

So once I’ve finished writing this to prove to the doubters that I do sometimes have time away from my laptop, I’ll be finishing Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds and moving on to The Medusa Chronicles, which he wrote with Stephen Baxter, and enjoying the best music in world from a field somewhere in Derbyshire.

Words: Paul Grenyer